


fever rest

by MOUSE9000



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Codependency, Crimes & Criminals, Haircuts, M/M, On the Run, Service Top
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-17
Updated: 2021-02-17
Packaged: 2021-03-13 04:15:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,887
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29520729
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MOUSE9000/pseuds/MOUSE9000
Summary: Tozer tips his head forward a little, bumping his forehead up against the back of Hickey’s neck. It occurs to him—lazily, the thread of a thought drifting through his head, as things come to him when he’s half asleep—that he’s the closest he could be, more or less, to whatever it is that Hickey’s thinking about; just a bit of hair, a bit of flesh, a bit of skull away, but it doesn’t make it any easier to guess.Hickey goes, Tozer follows.
Relationships: Cornelius Hickey/Solomon Tozer
Comments: 11
Kudos: 19





	fever rest

They’ve dragged the rickety wooden chair into the little hotel bathroom and crowded the both of them into it, too. Tozer sits in front of the mirror. Hickey with hair clippers in his hands is an arresting and unsettling sight at first—Tozer can recall, faintly, a movie about a murderous barber—but he’s been at this for a several minutes, and he seems to know what he’s doing, more or less, so Tozer’s eased up a little bit since he’s started.

And he’s had the time to decide that he doesn’t mind it. Something about it _is_ nice, in an easy, uncomplicated sort of way. When he shuts his eyes, it’s just a neat collection of sensory things: how the buzzer rumbles across his scalp, leaving in its wake clippings that slip to tickle at the nape of his neck, and then, further still, down his bare back. The sound of the television’s murmur in the other room. How easy he can pick up on Hickey’s scent, close as he is like this: two-in-one shampoo-conditioner, cloying and cheap; the cigarette he’d had an hour or two ago, muted by the shower he’d just taken.

“I do hope you’ve done this before,” he tells him distractedly, as Hickey angles his head into place so that he can keep going, not as gently as Tozer would have liked. “If you make me look like an idiot, everyone’s going to look at me.”

“I have,” Hickey says, not nearly as decisively as Tozer might have found reassuring. “Stop fidgeting. I’m nearly finished.”

Tozer opens his eyes. Hickey’s face is a mask of concentration, starkly lit from the the light over the mirror—little and pale, tired and close. If he tried, he could lean in and kiss him, easily, but he doesn’t do it. 

His thoughts jam up abruptly when the clippers graze his ear—the pain is sharp, stinging, and sudden. Tozer twists his face up and ducks away. “Christ. Fuck,” he hisses, reaching up to cup his hand over the shell of his ear. He can feel blood wet underneath his fingers—not much, but a little bit, and he can see it when he pulls his hand away to inspect it. It’s just a nick, feels like, but it’s enough to mean that he’s had enough of Hickey and anything sharp in his hands for the present moment. 

“I barely got you!” Hickey protests, thumbing off the clippers. “Truly. You really _are_ dramatic—”

A ridiculous thing to come out of Hickey’s mouth, on a level that is, in fact, profound, but he doesn’t even have the sense to pick up on it when Tozer gives him a baleful look. “You’ve cut my ear off,” he tells him sourly, already getting up. Luckily enough, he’d finished, from what Tozer can tell as he runs his hand over his scalp. “I do hope you’re happy.”

Hickey frowns, but doesn’t appear to be distinctly troubled. He sets the clippers on the sink and cranes his neck to get a look at him. “I told you to keep still, didn’t I?” he insists. “You didn’t listen—let me see—”

Tozer thumbs away the blood that’s begun to meander down the shell of his ear and ignores him. “How’s it look?” he asks instead, already looking, for the first time. It’s his own face that he finds in the stained mirror, same as before; he looks tired as tired as Hickey does, and younger, too, although maybe that’s just because he hasn’t had his hair buzzed short like this since he was nineteen. But otherwise—structurally—he looks just as he had five minutes ago. “I don’t think this is going to do anything.”

“Well, it’s something,” Hickey says, angling to slot himself between Tozer and the sink so that he can unplug the buzzer. He’s radiating some stiffness in the way that he moves, faintly defensive. This _had_ been his idea, which—it’s become quite clear—has been the enduring theme of the past several months, for better and mostly for worse. “Can’t change your face, can I?” He pauses, contemplative. “Could give you a scar.” 

Tozer wrinkles his nose. “Ha bloody ha,” he says, not really sure if that’s a joke, and eager to hurry it along into that particular category. Hickey grins at him in the mirror as he briskly runs the tap over his hands. “You’ve done enough to my ear. Do I have to do yours, then?”

“My ear or my hair?”

“Either. Your hair.”

Hickey thumbs the tap off and flicks the water from his hands. “We can’t both do it, can we?” he asks, wiping them dry with the frayed hem of his shirt. “It’d be suspicious. The pair of us.” Tozer supposes that Hickey is right, but nonetheless treats himself to the brief and amusing mental image of Hickey with his hair buzzed short. “I’ll dye it, or something.”

Tozer thinks about that, instead, as Hickey packs up the clippers, and finds that he doesn’t like it, even if he hadn’t been consulted. Hickey with his hair black like ink, or—god forbid—bleached into oblivion is wrong, in his head, just as much as Hickey with his hair short is. 

“It’s good how it is,” he offers without thinking about it much—and maybe that’s why it sounds stupid out loud, and maybe that’s why Hickey eyes him with something that approaches suspicion. In the mirror, Tozer can see the pink creep into his own face. “I mean. It’s nice.”

“And I’ll bet you say that to all the girls,” Hickey says lightly; it’s with the sort of prickly amusement he puts on whenever something’s thrown him off. He moves to winds past him, one cold hand ghosting against the bare flesh of Tozer’s side, there and gone again, quick and searing.

And it makes Tozer want to catch him in his hands, just to see if he could. He reaches out, gets a hold on Hickey’s arm so that he has to go still, taking advantage of Hickey’s surprise at being touched to keep him there. “I don’t,” he tells him. 

Sometimes, he wonders if Hickey knows what he’s left behind; how much he’s lost for this dingy little hotel room. Sometimes he wonders if Hickey cares, or if Hickey sees it that way at all: if to him, this is all just some sort of transformation—the same thing, just changed. 

Or maybe he just doesn’t think about it at all. Tozer doesn’t, usually, because he doesn’t have the time for it. It’s hard to peer within, existing as he does, as they do, in this sort of a liminal state. Always going, going, going. Hickey used to say that he could get them to Malibu, in America, somehow, eventually, that he knows a man. Why Malibu, or what’s there for them, Tozer is uncertain; the only thing that he particularly knows about it is its association with Barbie, and he strongly suspects that it’s the same for Hickey. But then again, he hasn’t said anything about it in weeks—it might have been a passing flight of fancy. 

Sometimes he thinks that he’ll wake up in one of these hotel rooms and Hickey will be gone. Now, he releases him, giving Hickey an opportunity to duck away if he wants to, which he doesn’t. 

So Tozer reaches up cautiously so that he can settle a hand in his hair, smoothing it away from his face as Hickey—from the look on his face—tries to decide if he likes it. Tozer hadn’t lied; he does like it like this, tucked neat behind Hickey’s big ears, still a little bit damp from the shower. When Hickey makes an attempt to squirm away from the attention, Tozer holds him fast, slipping a hand down to cup his jaw. 

“I meant it,” he tells him, emboldened. When he drags the pad of his thumb across Hickey’s cheek, he leaves a tacky smudge of blood in its wake, stark against his skin. “I like it, is all.”

Tozer watches Hickey think—sussing out, probably, if there’s something that he can take from that. If not now, then someday. 

After a few seconds, Hickey smiles. “Yours does suit you, when it’s long, I think,” he says finally. He sounds wistful, a little bit, but Tozer thinks he might be imagining it. “I suppose it’ll grow.”

❖❖❖

“Keep going,” Hickey urges, and Tozer’s head swims. He’s wanted to come, it feels, for the last three hours, although they couldn’t have been at this for longer than some tens of minutes. Just when he’d gotten used to his short hair, it had grown out, seemingly overnight, just as they’d made it into the summer months—and now he’s hot enough to miss it a little bit, now that he can feel the sweat prickling at his temples, even with the creaking ceiling fan circling lazily overhead, here in the dingy little flat they were paying for in cash for this and the next month. 

“Cornelius,” he groans, and gives another half-hearted thrust, rough and clumsy. He’s as reluctant to withdraw from Hickey’s tight heat as much as he is reluctant to keep from fucking him—two warring wants, since one, in practice, tends to involve the other.

They haven’t fucked in ages, and Hickey never wants to do it _normally_ —not without telling him to do something, or to not do something, or how to do or not do it. The last time he’d come, Hickey had gotten him off quick and dirty with his hand from the passenger seat of the car, in the vast, vacant wasteland of a car park, but nonetheless technically in public, with a punishingly cool disinterest. He’d made Tozer beg him to let him touch him, and then he hadn’t let him do it, although he’d licked Tozer’s come off his own hand once he’d finished, a visual that Tozer has revisited privately with such a frequency so that, inexplicably, it makes him feel guilty for it.

Hickey lets him touch him now, but perhaps it’s out of necessity rather than altruism. Tozer likes it anyway—how the curve of his waist feels under his hand, how they stick together, a little bit, in the summer heat, the way the little bit of stubble that Hickey’s got dusting his jaw scrapes against the side of Tozer’s face as he drives in again, fingers flexing down on where he’s keeping him steady. He wonders, hazily, if it will bruise. 

“Don’t call me that,” Hickey pants, propping himself up by leaning back heavy on one elbow. He has to give a little wriggle to do it, and Tozer can _feel_ it, tight as he is around his cock, enough so that it makes him thrust, shallowly, on some base impulse, before he can stop himself. Head bowed, he exhales shakily, forcing himself to still again. He can’t keep going. He’ll come if he does, he thinks, with a tinge of desperation. All he needs is a second to collect himself, and then he can keep on.

What had Hickey said? It takes a second for Tozer to remember what he’d called him. He can feel the sweat drip into his eyes; it stings, and he blinks it away. 

“What should I call you,” he manages hoarsely, and Hickey says nothing, does nothing except look annoyed and impatient. And looking at him doesn’t help, because he’s good to look at like this—laid out in front of him, blotchy and flushed all the way up to his chest from what he’s letting Tozer do to him, shirt rucked half up. When the light falls into his face, his eyes look like the sea when it’s clear. Tozer could come just from looking at him, even if he’s not allowed to, even if he’s trying not to, very much, right now. 

And for all of his interjections, he’s liking how this has gone, anyway; Tozer can see that from how hard he is, slick from it. Wanting to touch him, Tozer grasps it with his fist, giving it a languid stroke as he cants his hips, grinding in, taking a second to enjoy that, the pace he’d like better—it feels right to fuck slow when it’s hot like this in the summer. He’s rewarded by the way that it makes the loftiness in Hickey’s face flicker, just for a second, before he composes himself again.

And perhaps any pleasure he might take in it shows in his own face, because Hickey digs his heel into the back of Tozer’s thigh, spurring him on, impatient. “Harder,” he demands, imperious, even on his back for him like this, and Tozer’s collected himself enough to oblige him. 

The bed creaks underneath them, rattling as the headboard bumps back into the wall, as he begins to fuck him in earnest, and as he does it, Tozer ducks his head down, pressing his face to Hickey’s throat, damp with sweat. He can feel him swallow as he angles in just so; can hear the little sound he chokes off, quiet, when Tozer gets a little rough with him, a little careless. 

“More,” Hickey manages, even so, and nothing else, just a startled sort of gasp as Tozer turns his head and bites down on the curve between his neck and his shoulder, hard enough to hurt. Or maybe it’s a laugh. He tastes like sweat. He can feel one of Hickey’s hands settle on the back of his neck, and then his nails, as they dig into his skin.

❖❖❖

Mostly, they pull off to the side of the road and sleep in the car. Tozer’s gotten used to it; he likes parts of it, even. It feels, faintly, like camping, like he’d done when he was a kid. When they fold the backseat down, they both fit, just barely, although they’d do a better job of it if they’d both been Hickey sized. As it stands, Tozer has to tuck himself around Hickey carefully, the two of them sandwiched between the miscellaneous clutter lingering from who’d had the car before, the football cones, the cardboard box stacked with wedding invitations, unsent, the bucket of bright pinnies. Sometimes, Tozer wonders if all that’s catalogued somewhere—just in case any of the car’s contents turns up in some skip someplace, three cities away from where they’d been recognized last. It’s why Hickey hasn’t tossed it, he thinks, or maybe it’s just because he’s lazy.

He is sorry that they probably had to order more invitations. He hopes that they had time.

With all the clutter, it’s a neat fit, but that makes it warmer for the two of them, and they need it—the season has changed. In the rooms he’s slept over the past few months, when they’ve had a bed big enough, Hickey had mostly slept on the far edge, curled up with his back to him like a comma. Here in the confines of the hatchback, they’re not afforded any space to put between them, even if Hickey would have wanted it, and on and off, Tozer likes it a little better this way, even if it means that occasionally, he has to suffer something such as an elbow to the nose when Hickey turns in his sleep.

They’re in such a jumble tonight, Tozer with an arm thrown over Hickey, his other one already starting to buzz with numbness from the weight of his body. The rain hurries down outside—each time a car streaks past where they’ve pulled into the woods, the water on the road makes it sigh as it goes.

It makes it feel smaller in here than it does during the day when he’s driving. He can tell that Hickey’s awake by the way that he moves, restless and fidgety. It isn’t normal. Usually he falls asleep first. 

Tozer tips his head forward a little, bumping his forehead up against the back of Hickey’s neck. It occurs to him—lazily, the thread of a thought drifting through his head, as things come to him when he’s half asleep—that he’s the closest he could be, more or less, to whatever it is that Hickey’s thinking about; just a bit of hair, a bit of flesh, a bit of skull away, but it doesn’t make it any easier to guess. 

“Sometimes I wonder if you really know where we’re going,” he mumbles haltingly. Even to his own ears, his voice sounds thick from tiredness; distant, like it’s coming from somewhere else. “Or if you just like to be looked for.” 

He loses the point of it, then, whatever he’d been building up to, and the more he thinks about it, the further it goes away. Hickey’s gone still next to him, which, in his defense, is how Tozer’s learned how he goes when he sleeps, like something a little more limp and pliant than a stone. So maybe he isn’t pretending.

It doesn't matter, Tozer thinks, as flexes his hand and grimaces. When he shifts carefully, so not to wake him if he’s asleep, the blood rushes back into his arm all at once, sharp and quick and searing. Outside, the rain keeps coming.

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from [here](https://youtu.be/S07LIKZbf9o)! On twitter at @mrhickey420.


End file.
